Q&A with Amy Snover

Amy Snover, director of the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group, discusses how to talk publicly about—and more importantly, act upon—climate change.

You’re one of the state’s foremost “climate resilience” evangelists. How do you define that?
Being prepared for, able to recover from, and capable of adapting to climate- related challenges.

In 2015, you co-authored the Puget Sound State of Knowledge Report. Why is it still a must-read?
Our goal was to assemble the current scientific knowledge about how climate change would affect Puget Sound, from our water to our forests, to our coasts, to our communities and public health through all kinds of issues, like erosion, flooding, heat waves, you name it. It’s an encyclopedic reference of what the current state of understanding was about how much and how fast changes would occur on the ground here in the Northwest.

The report also included examples of local governments that were already preparing for those impacts. Is there any commonality when it comes to cities proactively preparing for climate change?
What we’ve seen across communities, across the region, and across different levels of government is that you can point to a leader who has made that decision and made that a priority of the organization or community, someone who recognizes the risk that’s coming and feels a responsibility to prepare for it.

How do you do that in a community that’s polarized around this topic?
Climate change is a stressor, something that causes problems or makes problems worse. If a community is facing droughts or fires or floods, talk about that, then talk about what you’re going to do when droughts or floods or fires become more frequent and worse. Go right to the actual issue, the thing that’s felt on the ground, and talk about how to address that.

In other words, focus on the immediate effects of climate change, but don’t dwell on the cause?
I’m not advocating that you only sit down and talk about what your community’s current problems are. I still think it’s important to have your scientific basis right underneath you while you have that conversation, because there are specific things we know about climate change. But what I’m saying is that you can be attentive to language that may push buttons and get in the way of effective conversation.

How do you do that?
I don’t shy away personally from describing the state of scientific understanding about the human role in climate change and what science tells us needs to be done to slow and stop it. Where I am careful and thoughtful—and listen more than I talk—is when we’re talking about what people’s hopes and goals are for how to address it.

What’s one thing local leaders need to consider when talking about climate change?
It’s really important to understand that climate change pushes on our sore spots, and it’s going to make a lot of things that really challenge us a lot harder to deal with. So actually spending time to identify what we value as communities and what we’re hoping to build together or preserve together is a really important step in preparing for these impacts.

What’s the priority for local budgets: investing in initiatives to fight global warming, or infrastructure projects to protect against its impact?
Unfortunately, the choice is no longer whether you put all your eggs in the “reduce emissions” basket or the “just deal with the consequences” basket. Both are essential, and both are unavoidable.

What advice do you have for local leaders?
Do what you already have to do, which is be strategic about finding opportunities to achieve more than one thing with a decision or an investment, while making sure that building climate resilience is in the mix.

We’re really going to have to think hard about how we “multi-solve,” how we solve for more than one problem at once.

Any last thoughts?
Climate change pulls almost every thread; it connects to all kinds of things you might not think about. What every leader can do is remind people that every decision, every investment, every policy we make right now can set us up for either climate resiliency or climate risk. Every single day, we’re making decisions and investments that will determine our future vulnerability or risk to climate change.